Fedora Notes

Minitube is an interesting application featuring the phonon multimedia engine of qt4. It can browse and play youtube videos without flash player installed using phonon (normally using phonon-gstreamer backend).

After enabling wellassa repo minitube can be installed for Fedora 11 x86_64 by giving this command:

sudo yum install minitube

Arora was started as a demo application to test the QtWebkit functionality in 2008. Now it has evolved to an almost feature complete web browser.  I have been using this browser in Fedora for some time along with both Firefox and Opera. I have not yet installed Google Chrome because for my 64bit Fedora 11 box it’s difficult to build a native x86_64 version of Chrome. So my Webkit experience has primarily been on Arora web browser and I’m really impressed with its performance.

Recently I ran a Google V8 benchmark on firefox, opera and Arora running on my Fedora 11 X86_64 box and here are the overall scores.

V8 Benchmark Suite – version 5

Firefox 3.51  score:209

Opera 10.00 Beta 2 Build 4520 (gcc4, shared qt4) score: 169

Arora 0.8.0 (shared qt4) score: 548

Even though these results alone cannot be used to judge the speed of each browser, Arora is indeed fast. In the long run what I felt was both Arora and Opera is significantly faster than Firefox.

If you want to install Arora for Fedora 11 I’ve packaged a x86_64 rpm. As usual first install Wellassa Linux repo if you have not already done so and issue:

“sudo yum install arora”

picture : Arora running V8 benchmark

As usual download Fedora 11 using bittorrent!

Downloading Fedora 11 x86-64bit DVD using  aria2.

Now you can install Golly,  which is an excellent Conway’s Game of Life and other Cellular Automation simulator, in fedora 10 by following these steps.

First install wellassa linux fedora repository.

sudo rpm -Uhv http://download.wellassa.org/fedora/10/i386/wellassa-linux-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Then install golly by giving:

sudo yum install golly

To install Lucidlife another game of life simulator based on the simulation algorithms developed by Alan Hensel give following command.

sudo yum install lucidlife

For more information

• Wonders of Math, the game of life
• Alan Hensel’s page – Life simulation applet and more info.